KonMari 2018 - The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

GreyQueen

Replace roofing felt at a 25 year frequency?! What nonsense is this. My parents house (built 1963) is still on its original felt and others on their road are just now being re-felted by the council.


A building surveyor once told me that you leave roofs alone until they leak, then you deal, you don't inspect/ do planned maintenance etc.


Donation bag is at the chazzer and I reckon I am just past the halfway mark of clearing the carload which was dropped off last Sunday. Will aim to get a bit more out tomorrow and may have it all gone by theend of next week, if we're spared.


Am attending to a mending job for something belonging to the mothership, which will go back to theirs eventually.

luxor4t

GreyQueen wrote: »

Replace roofing felt at a 25 year frequency?! What nonsense is this. My parents house (built 1963) is still on its original felt and others on their road are just now being re-felted by the council.......

Exactly.

We get the storms off the Atlantic; gale force wind plus copious rain means water gets into every nook and cranny. I think we have either got a cracked tile or a problem with the lead flashing. But the roofer hasn't been up to look closely and his "inspection" was done from the street only. I was hoping for a drone :cool:

The boxes I ordered from *b*y arrived today, so we can start sorting stuff slow!y now.

Slinky

Kondo'd a load more stuff into our green bin yesterday, it was emptied on Thursday and is full again already. I've received the 2 new stickers for our extra bins, just need the bins now....


Our rodent visitors are still being trapped in the garden. No more rats caught or sited since the pond went, but mice a-plenty. Trouble is getting rid of them. The general rubbish bin (which is where the rat man said they should go) is only emptied every 2 weeks and is getting pretty smelly with 3 more days to go. We have a freezer in the garage we don't use for food........ We've decided to freeze the little blighters in a box until bin day, first corpse went in this morning. We're currently catching 1-2 a day. Cat has also caught some, we found some body parts on the doormat (inside) a couple of days ago. Which reminds me, I need to buy worming treatments.


One thing we have discovered, we've got blackberries coming over the fence from the council land next door, the plants are thornless. Do thornless blackberries exist other than cultivars? I had been hacking back what I thought looked like brambles in other parts of our garden, but wasn't sure whether I'd identfied them correctly as they were thornless. I'm wondering if they were originally planted in the garden, have spread outside to the council land and that's how they are coming over the fence. Anyway, I kondo'd a few of them yesterday into a crumble with some apples, and very good it was too.


More jobs done yesterday, picture hanging, wobbly loo seat tightened, and our hopeless bathroom basin tap which sprayed what little water coming out of it over us, turned out the head was blocked up with limescale. This has now been descaled and is a lot more joyful.

GreyQueen

Am LMAO at the idea of the deep frozen vermin, excellent solution btw, just imagining an unwary person foraging for something for dins in said freezer and coming up with.......!:rotfl:


I read somewhere that there are about 500 varieties of blackberry in this country, so I guess it's possible that some of them might have no thorns or neglible thorns, they certainly are a lucky find, tho.

DawnW

The thornless blackberries could be escapees - they are really rampant and spread like mad. I planted one once, it grew huge, and spread everywhere. I spent the next years trying to get rid of it. For all I know it is still there, as we moved from that house about 20 years ago.

Slinky

DawnW wrote: »

The thornless blackberries could be escapees - they are really rampant and spread like mad. I planted one once, it grew huge, and spread everywhere. I spent the next years trying to get rid of it. For all I know it is still there, as we moved from that house about 20 years ago.

I've been digging out thornless brambles in a lot of the garden. I think we'll be quite happy to keep the ones coming over the fence!


At the bottom of our garden we back onto a pub garden, which has a wall about 8 feet high, with ivy coming over the top from their side. It's growing around 3-4ft away from the wall on our side, so when the green bins come, is what is being eyed up to go next.


We planted out the strawberry plants we brought from our previous home at the weekend, plus put some seed down in the patches on the 'lawn' where I killed the weeds earlier in the year. The surrounding grass wasn't filling out to take up the space. The 'lawn' will be wrecked when we eventually get building work done, so there's no point spending any money on it at the moment, but it really does look completely horrible as it is.

Slinky

The weekend kondoing saw the ivy from the pub wall go into the green bins. Unfortunately we were out the day the blokes came with the bin delivery, they only left us one new one instead of the two we paid for. I called the council and they said they'd try and get another one delivered by today as our next collection is tomorrow, but as yet it hasn't turned up. We had an old small one from the previous scheme which we've filled and will attach the label to temporarily as we guessed the new bin wouldn't turn up in time.


The removal of the ivy has revealed some serious cracking in the wall, we will let the pub know when we get a chance to go round. There's some horizontal cracks I can fit 3 fingers width into vertically, where the ivy coming from their side is growing through the brickwork. I believe the wall is listed, so hopefully they will get it repaired. There's some previous pointing been done quite unsympathetically with a modern mortar. The original looks like lime.



Sunday we spent some time in our very hot garage painting part of the wall white and OH has now got some space to put the racking in for his junk/stuff. Racking ordered, waiting on a delivery date. Once that is in and OH has unpacked some of the boxes, it should make some space for us to get to paint some more of the wall to repeat the exercise.


I phoned the removal company a month ago asking them to collect their boxes. I chased this week and they said they haven't had any removals in our direction and not sure when they will have, despite them saying they visit our area regularly. They agreed I can get rid. I've offered them on Freecycle, no takers as yet. Annoying really as a couple of lots of people have requested boxes whilst I was waiting for the removals people. We just want them gone from the garage, but it seems such a waste to recycle them.



OH went to the tip this morning with some old junk that's going from the garage, only they were closed, so it's all still in the back of my car. I made the mistake of asking him to call by Mr T to buy some food on his way back. I've now got Tesco Finest, and Heinz soups ("but they were on a deal" "they're still more expensive than own brand"). And previously he's been flapping that he's not bringing any money in at the moment....


At least I've had a small win in that some model cars that were moved from cupboards at his mum's into our old loft, then the new garage, which he was talking about putting into our new loft ("for what purpose darling"), he volunteered at the weekend that he's taken out ones he wants to keep and the others can go to the charity shop. A small win will take place tomorrow.


On the rodent front, caught another large rat at the weekend, only our second one, and several more mice are alongside it in "The Mortuary".

silvasava

DgD hasnt come to look at the pots and pans I've kondoed so I'll give her a nudge and if she's changed her mind they'll go to the CS. They're perfectly good, they're copper bottomed and dont go on an induction hob I've also got a gas hob to get rid of one way or another, two nice toughened glass worktop savers and a couple of ceramic utensil jars. They're all cluttering up the back bedroom at the moment but I'm away this weekend so that will be on the 'to do' list for early next week.

Slinky

silvasava, we've got a couple of spare worktop savers too, as bought for our tenants when we were renting the house out. Have brought our previous ones with us from the old house. As they take up almost no space when flat in the bottom of a cupboard, I'll keep them and use them when either the current ones get broken or the pictures on them fade badly, which is what happened with some previous ones we owned.

luxor4t

50 lots sold on *Bay and are now bringing joy to their new owners. The next tranche are ready to list after DH's birthday weekend away, which - what a surprise!- is mostly financed from my *Bay adventures.

All getting together and visiting places of interest is so much better than trying to help the kids think of something to buy!

I'm having something framed for him - a piece of tapestry that was rolled up in a cupboard in his mother's house for as long as he can remember. It will be 120 (?) years old when it gets back on the wall.

So, things are slowly moving out or to the right place.